Actually for those who are looking for pretty much the best PCI card, I would recommend the Zotac GT430 PCI. The overclocking headroom is quite decent on a card like that, replace the cooler with a decent fan and you're more than set 8D. The main reason though is the amount of CUDA Cores/Streaming Processors (same thing). The 430 has 96 Cores, while the 520 and other later edition PCI cards only have 48. Why does this matter? Well, ever been to the site gpureview.com? It allows you to compare graphics cards. Though if you try to compare the two cards, it displays the 430 as 128-bit, when both the 520 and 430 are only 64-bit (32x2).

I'll show you my calculations in this quote:
(BOLD indicates similar or much better, except for card name)

I'm going to show you the performance of both cards clocked at 900 MHz for both the Core and Memory clock. Both these cards can hit this number, if not more.

Now if you notice, the GFLOPS is more than doubled compared to the 430, and the only slight downside is that the 430 only handles OpenGL 3.2, though realistically that does not matter.

Side note, PCI cards are capable of 128 bit, my old Radeon 9250 PCI is capable of such. If they implemented 128 bit in newer PCI cards, performance would be much better. Same for AGP, I'm pretty sure that it can withstand a 6670 GDDR3 card, possibly a GDDR5 if you push it a bit. Who says PCI and AGP are dead, they're much more capable than what we even realize =P that's why they're still making cards for those stuck with AGP or PCI slots.

P.S I went through the trouble of doing this because my parent's computer only has PCI slots. I've been searching for the best PCI card I could lay my hands on and since no one has compared these two cards. I thought I would do it myself ^_^

He's looking for a card for media playback and the GT520 is enough for that. I suggested a PCI card because the Conroe865GV has an AGI slot which won't work with many AGP cards.

128bit PCI cards aren't a rarity or anything. You can have a 256 or 512bit card on a PCI slot since the 128/256/512bit is just the link width between the VRAM and GPU. It's when the card has to communicate with the CPU that the PCI link shows its ugly head. That's why most PCI cards are low end models, there's no point into making an HD5770 PCI for example.

AGP cards are another story since it has certain optimizations over PCI that accelerate graphics data in addition to the faster link (fastwrite, sideband addressing, GART). An AGP8x slot has the same bandwidth as PCIe 2.0 4x (PCIe 1.0 8x) so I think that something like an HD5770 could be very possible with no or little bottlenecking. There is one caveat however: only ATi and nVidia provided their AGP-PCIe bridge chips; making PCI cards from PCIe GPUs is easy because PLX has a bidirectional PCI-PCIe bridge chip and sells it to anyone but there's no AGP-PCIe chip being sold right now.

WAIT O_O it just clued into me that my friend knows a leading developer in AMD x-x I'll try to get a hold of them and see if they can get that developer to push things for us AGP users =P that's if I can remember my Skype account =/

On a side note, PCI cards may be slow when communicating with the CPU but increasing the bandwidth should in turn increase the performance of the card without having to be influenced so much by that downside.

I recall that HIS was in the planning stages for an HD5670 AGP but I think the poor sales of the HD4650/70 just put them off. After all these years you can still find them new in many retailers, like newegg for example.

WAIT O_O it just clued into me that my friend knows a leading developer in AMD x-x I'll try to get a hold of them and see if they can get that developer to push things for us AGP users =P that's if I can remember my Skype account =/

On a side note, PCI cards may be slow when communicating with the CPU but increasing the bandwidth should in turn increase the performance of the card without having to be influenced so much by that downside.

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increasing the clock rate of the PCI/AGP/PEG bus can cause instability, and can be hard to diagnose when other parts are overclocked

Yeah, I guess that whomever wanted to update an AGP system would have bought the 3850, and yes, an HD4770 AGP would have been the shit.

On other news, I bought the Thermalright HR-05; should get here on about a month or so. Also I'm modding my case to accommodate a Sanace water cooling kit for LGA775, so my Octanux is out of commission ATM.

I just bought one of these boards on ebay, hoping to re-use parts from my P4 based media PC. I had been using an Asus P4P800SE with a Prescott P4 3.4GHz, Gigabyte Radeon HD4650 AGP, and 4GB Gskill PC3200 RAM. This setup was fine for most downloaded video, but HD streaming from Netflix, YouTube (1080p) and CWTV.com were choppy.

Thinking the CPU was the bottleneck, I did some research, found this board for $25 bucks on ebay, and bought an e5800 to go along with it. Netflix HD is much improved, but to my surprise, 1080p YouTube is still choppy and I'm not sure where my bottleneck is anymore.

Thanks, TRWOV. It seems odd. When I'm playing a 1080p video, the CPU never exceeds 40% load and the GPU doesn't exceed 75%, yet I can still see mini-stuttering in the video that's not visible on my other computer. I should mention that I have everything currently set at stock speeds.

That's a cheap ebay aluminium cooler with mounting rails for a 40mm fan. The fan is a Noiseblocker. I'll replace that with an HR-05 IFX soon; I don't expect it'll perform better I just think it'll look cooler

For the Conroe865PE, due to the 3455MB limitation and the slow RAM I'd prefer to have more VRAM to avoid taping into the shared system RAM. Besides, the HD3850 and HD4670 have almost identical performance at 1680x1050 and below. I'll surely use the HD3850 for benchmarks though.

Just make sure to overclock the HD4670's VRAM as much as you can as that's its main Achilles heel.

Not buying one though as the only AGP system I can even tolerate is my AM2NF3-VSTA with a 940BE @ 3.4GHz, 3850 AGP @ 700/1000 and 4GB DDR2-1066. Sucks being stuck with XP but all of the CPUs I have for my 4CoreDual-SATA2 are extremely sluggish compared to the Phenom II X4 and they can't keep up with the 3850 in games like Team Fortress 2.

VLB I also get the mini stuttering. I let the video play once and then replay to eliminate streaming issues but I still get the stuttering. I don't get it at the same spots in each replay though, on my third replay I got to the first scene of the green aurora (1:30) before the stuttering kicked in.

I think that the issue is related to the codec used by Youtube. Only the fast scrolling parts of the video stutter, even in the same scene you can see the solar panels move smoothly even if the backdrop stutters like crazy. I guess that the GPU framebuffer isn't getting the tile updates fast enough, maybe the slow (by today's standards) FSB might be to blame. Could also be the low RAM bandwidth (3200MB/s).

TRWOV, I think you are right about the issue being an inefficiency in YouTube's Flash player. I also tested the video on a Gigabyte EP43-DS3R board with an e8400 (3GHz, 1333 FSB), CL4 PC6400 RAM, and two different PCI-E video cards (HD5450 and HD4650) and still had the mini-stutters pretty bad.

Then I tried leeching the .MP4 file and playing it with Media Player Classic and it was butter smooth on all setups.

Heyya TRWOV I just noticed your new phenomenal build, I looked up that board and it seems crazy o3o

How does it come into performance compared to the ConRoe with a QX6700? ;o

I noticed it supports 16GB or RAM, AGP and a Phenom II X4 3.5 GHz x-x It seems as if it could outrun the Conroe the only thing holding it back is the AGP but my intentions of getting the Conroe was to try and get the best AGP build I could possibly get and if that motherboard is better I'll probably get it o-o

Heyya TRWOV I just noticed your new phenomenal build, I looked up that board and it seems crazy o3o

How does it come into performance compared to the ConRoe with a QX6700? ;o

I noticed it supports 16GB or RAM, AGP and a Phenom II X4 3.5 GHz x-x It seems as if it could outrun the Conroe the only thing holding it back is the AGP but my intentions of getting the Conroe was to try and get the best AGP build I could possibly get and if that motherboard is better I'll probably get it o-o

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The AM2NF3 only supports XP x86 for full AGP acceleration which is the Achilles heel of it. Otherwise everyone would be using one I bet as DDR2 1066 and a 3.5ghz CPU are the best you can get for AGP.

Be really careful with the VRM temps too. My stock 965BE C3 under full load = 100c VRM temps which explains the heat damage on the PCB. I'm going to delist mine from my FS thread because I tried putting VRM sinks on it from my Arctic Cooling GPU cooler with their 2 part thermal glue which made a huge ass mess, don't even know how long the stuff takes to cure as the sinks were loose 2 hours after application and I'm afraid to even turn it on now.